Episode 4: Builders Win

In today’s business environment, technical expertise alone isn’t enough to stand out. As industries evolve and artificial intelligence reshapes how knowledge is accessed, the professionals who thrive are the ones who know how to build, relationships, opportunities, and value.

In this episode of Mitchell’s Moments Coaching Podcast, executive coach Mitchell Schuckman introduces a powerful concept, builders win. He breaks down four common types of professionals, experts, protectors, truth tellers, and builders, and explains why the builder mindset is becoming the most critical for long term success.

Drawing from his experience in professional services and coaching, Mitchell explains how relying solely on expertise is becoming less differentiating, while collaboration, relationship building, and understanding client needs are becoming essential. Through real world coaching examples, he shows how shifting from a transactional mindset to a partnership mindset can unlock new opportunities, even in challenging environments.

At its core, this episode is about thinking differently, not just about what you do, but how you create value for others. 

This episode explores:

• The four types of professionals and why builders stand out
• Why expertise alone is becoming less differentiating in an AI-driven world
• How relationship-building creates long-term business opportunities
• The importance of aligning with client goals to create real value
• How a builder mindset drives growth, even in difficult business conditions

Mitchell’s Moments delivers short, focused conversations designed to provide practical leadership insights you can apply immediately.

Learn more about Mitchell Schuckman and The Schuckman Group at
 theschuckmangroup.com

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Each episode delivers short, practical insights on leadership, coaching, business development, and navigating today’s changing business world.

You can also learn more about Mitchell Schuckman and his coaching and leadership programs at
www.theschuckmangroup.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hello and welcome to Mitchell's Moments Coaching Podcast. Today's episode four, and those of you who've been listening to my podcast know the goal of my podcast, every episode should be between 15 and 20 minutes, never more than 20 minutes. Pick a topic, cover it well, give you some food for thought, move on with your day. I'm Mitchell Schuckman, I'm the founder of the Shuckman Group. I provide executive coaching, leadership development, team coaching, and a special focus on growth and business development and providing consulting in that area as well. So, today's topic is something I call builders win, and it's having a business development mindset every day. Now, why is this so important? I mean, obviously, business development has always been important. You know, the rainmakers always get rewarded, especially in professional services firms, accounting, consulting, law, engineering, the ones who can bring in the new clients are the ones who really are viewed as the most successful. Here's the thing, though a lot of people don't like to do business development. A lot of people like to be subject matter experts and sit in their office and do work. But this issue is becoming a hotter and hotter issue now than ever before. Let me explain why. Looking back on my career, I'm generalizing now, but I'm gonna put the partners, the senior people I've worked with, into four buckets. And whether you work for a, like I used to work for a big four accounting firm, but this could be true for any senior leader in any company, especially a professional services company. Four kinds of leaders in my parlance, four kinds of partners. One, the expert, the subject matter expert, the one who knew all the rules, the regulations, who basically made a living out of being the smartest person in the room. In fact, they thrived on coming into the room and talking about laws and regulations and court cases and rulings and loved knowing all that stuff. That's type one. Type two, I'll call them the protector. They were someone who knew, had a client relationship, and wouldn't let anyone else talk to that client. It's my client, it's my relationship. Only I could talk to them. And these partners often were very successful, especially if they had a client who really liked them and they and they made a lot of money and they did a lot of great work for that client. Great. But they weren't bringing in others. They definitely were gatekeepers to that own to that client relationship. And I call them protectors because they only built to the within the framework in which they personally could control the delivery of the work. So that's the protector. The third type of partner I used to work with is I call them the truth teller. They're always the person in the room who, when we're sitting there talking about an opportunity or a problem or a strategy, they would say, all right, let's be real. Here's what's really going to happen. Or here's why your strategy is too optimistic. Or here's the bad thing you're not considering. They always had like an opinion that made you reconsider your thought process. I call them the truth tellers. And then they're the builders. The builders are the people who knew how to make relationships pretty much anywhere. At their clients, at clients of other firms, they would go to cocktail parties and mixers, and they would be the ones working the room. When they won work, when they got work in a client, they brought colleagues into the client, they introduced their client to more and more people, and they built, they built a big opportunity and opportunities at particular clients. Those are the builders. Now, why do we now builders always were the people who were probably the most highly compensated? They were certainly admired by the leadership because they grew the business. However, I think that the building, being a builder is more important today than ever before. Because if you think about it, A, being a subject matter expert is great. We're still always going to need experts. The problem is if you're like even a slight tier below the top experts, AI has become a great equalizer. I mean, I can go into AI. If I ask it the right question, I could get all of the information that the expert has. And if they understand it more deeply than me, well, what I do is I ask AI to explain it to me at a more granular level. Pretend I'm a sixth grader, pretend I'm a high school student, and I work my way up until I understand it. It takes a little time, but I could get there awfully quickly because AI is a level setter when it relates to sharing knowledge. So if you're going to be a subject matter, a deep subject matter expert and rely on that, you're really going to need to be at the top echelon. So less important than maybe it was to be. Protectors, not a great thing. Because if you're not leveraging the rest of your organization to provide exceptional service to your client, some other firm is going to do it. So being a protector is very limiting. And being a truth teller, look, being a truth teller is not a bad thing, but it's not a revenue generator. It's not, it's well, it's not creating new value. And frankly, you can also use AI to be a truth teller. Here's my hypothesis, AI. Please tell me what some reasons to refute it. Please tell me what I'm not thinking about. Be devil's advocate, and it will do that for you. So the truth teller role is limiting, but the builder role is something that's more important than ever given the world that we're living in right now. So, how do we become builders? Well, I'll give you two examples. One is building through better teamwork. Let me start with that one. So, you know, every time that I was responsible for leading a team, I would use, everyone who knows me knows I love quotes. I would use the Michael Jordan quote: players win games, teams win championships. And I would say that because I always felt like if you were a team of people working for you, and one of those people, or one or two of those people, were super smart and highly valuable, but they didn't make the rest of their teammates better, then their role was very limited. And everyone knows this story about Michael Jordan when he first came out of North Carolina, University of North Carolina and played for the Chicago Bulls. He was the rookie of the year, he scored a ton of points, led the league in scoring, and never won a championship. And Phil Jackson came in to coach the Bulls and they said, Michael, I don't need you to lead the team in scoring. I need you to make the rest of your teammates better. If you lift them up, there will be a multiplier effect, and you're the one who's capable of lifting them up. And once Michael started doing that, the Bulls started winning championships. So I took that philosophy at work and I said, team, if you're a great performer and you're not making anyone else better, I don't think I want you on my team. If you're a great performer and you make others better, first of all, I'll recognize it. But second of all, our team will shine. So I'll tell you a quick story. Um now that I have my own consulting practice and I'm outside of the corporate world, I was asked by a former colleague to join a meeting with her and her team and her client and her client's team. So there were probably a solid 30 people in a room doing a team building day, trying to figure out what they're what they did well the past year and what they're what they would plan for to prioritize for next year. So she asked me to come and talk to the team about how they put how they could perform better, both her team and the client's team together. And I said, amongst other things, don't behave like two teams. Don't behave like a service provider and a client. Behave like a single team serving the client's organization. So it's not service provider providing services to a client, the client's people receiving it. It's the client's people and the service provider working together to create value for the client. And so they took that it resonated really well. And one of the people in the room stood up and they said, Well, Mitchell, the service provider, the people who work at the service provider, they have their goals. They have to make a certain amount of money, they have to make a profit margin on that money, they have to focus on things like you know quality and things that are important to their firm. The people at the service provider have their own goals as it relates to their company. How do we combine them? And my answer is pretty simple. If you look at the client's side of the table and you look at the senior most person at the client, and you find out what their goals are, what will make them be considered an exceptional performer, what will make them be considered for the top raises, bonuses, whatever they're eligible for, and we find out what those things are, and we all client, clients team, service provider, service providers team, all use those as their goals, their North Star. You will have a lot of success and you will do great things, and you will operate as one team. In today's world, with with all of the change going on, and once again I'll say AI, these sorts of edges, these cutting-edge behaviors, in this example of operating as a team with your client and operating a team as a team with your service provider, is that edge you need to stay ahead of the curve. And I've I, as you as I just mentioned, I coached this team on that. Let me give you another example. Um I'm coaching an individual who has a very, very difficult client. This client is in an industry that is struggling, or let's just let's just say being incredibly disrupted due to the uh AI tariffs and some some global and political unrest. They're under tremendous stress. And because of that stress, they're being told A, we don't have money to spend on professional services firms, or not nearly as much as we had. And we need to have less resources on our side doing this work. So the example I'm talking about, I mean, um it's okay to say because it's pretty generic, but these are tax services, my old area, and this client just doesn't have any money to spend to receive the level of tax services they used to receive, and they're not being given budget to hire more people to do it themselves. So I'm being I'm coaching a partner on the tax service provider side who's saying, I don't know what to do. This client is completely struggling, they're telling me they have no money, and they're telling me that that I can't help them. What do I do? And so we spent a lot of time talking about how do you get inside the mind of the person at the client who's responsible, the person who has the limited budget and the limited people. And how can you make them successful in difficult, challenging circumstances? And that mindset really unlocked a lot for this service provider because this service provider began to talk to the client, not like you need this done, you need that done, I can help you here, I can help you there, and more like tell me what's going on with you, tell me about the stress that you're feeling, tell me about what success would look like for you. Tell me what's standing in the way of that. Not because I'm gonna walk in with a magic solution, but because I want to understand you better, because I want to relate to your situation better, so I can figure out whether there's something that I can do for you or not. No stress, but I can't even begin to think about it if I'm not with you, if I'm not in your camp and understanding the way what's going on in your world. So, like the team thing that I talked about earlier, making the client's situation, goals, stresses, opportunities your own enable this partner to see the client more deeply and holistically, and to pick spots, small spots, spots where they could provide value that the A, the client would value, and B within the smaller budget the client had. Why this story is a perfect example of how to be a builder, even when circumstances are challenging. So, in conclusion, business landscape, very tough. Being a builder is really the most sustainable persona to be successful in this business environment. You could be an expert, you could be a protector, you could be a um truth teller, but those are not the way that's not gonna make you, that's not gonna help your career going forward as much as being a builder. And if you have the mindset as a builder that I'm gonna understand the other side, the the client side, I'm gonna understand what makes them successful and act to make them successful. If you can do all those things, you as a builder will be successful too. So that's it for episode four of Mitchell's Moments Coaching Podcast. Please, if any of these issues resonate with you and you'd like to have a conversation to see whether there's some coaching or training or team building or facilitating a meeting with you and your client, or you as a client with your service provider, please give me a call or find me at Mitchell at the Shuckman Group.com or go on the shuckmangroup.com website and send me an email or find me on social media and ping me. And please let's have a conversation about how I can help and how I can get you to become more, in this case, today's episode, to be more of a builder. Thank you for joining the Mitchell's Moments Coaching Podcast, episode four, and I look forward to seeing you next time. Take care.